‘Milder than normal’ winter expected in Ontario

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CP24 - Ontario residents are in store for a milder than normal winter season but that doesn’t mean we won’t see a white Christmas, according to Environment Canada.

Speaking with CP24 on the first day of December, senior climatologist with Environment Canada Dave Phillips said while it won’t feel as warm are last year’s winter, it will still feel above seasonal for the majority of December through February.

“What we’re showing is for the character, the personality of the winter coming up we think it’s going to be milder than normal in Ontario, Quebec, pretty well in eastern Canada,” Phillips said. “Now it’s going to be hard to repeat last winter.”

Phillips said last winter was the second warmest in the past 70 years.

“We had only 75 per cent of our snowfall,” he said. “We had more rain than snow last year. We had half the (usual) number of cold days.”

“We’re not talking about a repeat of that kind of open and soft kind of winter but we think the flavour of the winter will be actually milder than normal, but there will be some cold moments.”

Ontario residents will start to feel those cooler temperatures in about two weeks, according to Phillips.

“This will be the coldest of the winter and it might actually guarantee a white Christmas,” he said. “Overall, we think that snowfall (for the winter) doesn’t look like a horrendous amount and we certainly won’t see as much rain as we saw last year.”

On November 20, The Weather Network’s chief meteorologist Chris Scott told The Canadian Press that southern Ontario and Quebec might see mild conditions during the whole month of January after storms with lots of snow hit eastern Canada in December.

In Toronto, temperatures will continue to stay above seasonal through next week with high temperatures of 7 C, 8C, 8C, and 12C over the next four days respectively, but the high on Wednesday will drop to 1 C.